Official Group 4 Transition Discussion (UT/WY/MT/SD/ND/MI/MN/CO/IA/NE)

**bald1** · 05-25-2011, 09:57 PM

abenusa,

It would seem that one hand doesn't know what the other is doing with respect to towers and coverage within AT&T. During my visit documented in post #1271 above, two of the AT&T corporate reps were discussing their efforts to document discrepancies between their database/maps and what their customers were reporting. Obviously the fact that their map showed "good" coverage for my neighborhood yet the tower that was shown as responsible was also marked "pending" drew a flag, given my reports and those of my neighbors.

From my knothole it is incredibly incompetent if not outright stupid to have information that local store clerical staff access which portrays non-existent conditions. No wonder folks are pissed that they're being given a run around about poor or non-existent service when told "It must be your phone. Has the SIM card been swapped out yet?" or "It must be your property.... you have a bunch of trees?" or some other nonsense when in fact the damn towers aren't even operational. Excuse me.... I think the operable spin-speak term is "degraded" as opposed to non-operational

Compound this with what certainly appears to be just plain dumb decisions or possibly omissions such as the tower/coverage situation you describe impacting the campus population, and one must wonder about the efficacy of the managerial leadership on multiple levels within the AT&T Mobility operation. It boggles the mind!

That said I've committed to staying with AT&T for now. Verizon poisoned the well with their unbelievably arrogant and incompetent customer service with me back in 2005. If AT&T falls on its sword, I will revert back to my pre-1996 days and go back to having a land line and possibly add a third party pay-as-you-go cell for out of state road trips. Verizon will never see me as a customer again period.

**Jordan T** · 05-26-2011, 06:34 AM

bald1, I know what you mean about Verizon, they're awful. I agree... BUT, they're tempting now. In downtown Kalispell, MT the AT&T network is still overloaded beyond usability. It's much better than it was a month ago out where I live, but the downtown service is just awful...

Anyone have any insight if AT&T plans to fix things, or if they're just going to let the market balance it out (that is, wait for enough people to give up and cancel that the service is good enough for the remaining people)?

**bald1** · 05-26-2011, 05:50 PM

UPDATE

MicroCell installed.

Well this is a great turn for the better. I've gone from NO bars and NO 3G symbol to 5 bars / 3G in my home's lower level and 3 bars / 3G in the upper floor of this tri-level unit. I had to tweak the installation per the manual to address a "scratchy" "gravelly" voice quality. Everything is good to go now.

Those truly in a no service area might also find the results well worthwhile. AT&T apparently is providing these units gratis to customers with such service situations so it will pay to contact corporate reps for the remedy.

**PrairieKat** · 05-27-2011, 03:28 PM

Congrats bald1 on getting issues resolved.

**bald1** · 05-27-2011, 05:37 PM

Originally Posted by PrairieKat

Congrats bald1 on getting issues resolved.

Thanks PrairieKat. I'd still like to know when the Hart Ranch - Rockerville tower will be activated to service my Colonial Pine Hills area.

For those interested, what I'm finding suggests that the "radiation" of these femtocell units (the AT&T MicroCell is a Cisco unit) compared to what a typical cell phone generates next to your head when trying to connect with a very poor tower connection (meaning it generates max power under these circumstances) is much much less as a typical cellphone generates 250mW (1/4 watt). Femtocells operate at very low radiation power levels (50 milliwatts peak output during a call, typically 20mW, and much lower when idle). As an aside my LinkSys WRT54G WiFi Router is rated at 15 dBM which is the same as 32 milliwatts.

From what I'm now hearing it seems that AT&T may not be doing the best job of explaining what is going on to the public. Seems that the data they used to plan the transition was flawed. Why? Alltel and Verizon freely utilized each others CDMA tower structure. Having subscriber volume data in no way revealed how much of the volume was actually transmitted over Verizon towers. Now that AT&T has to stand alone with its 3G system, it has unmasked what Alltel customers were actually using in terms of towers. Now inadequacies in the 3G converted Alltel towers abilities alone to handle volume in some areas as well as lack of tower availability where service had existed before (via Verizon) has unexpectedly overwhelmed the AT&T folks. Additionally there appears to be a requirement to maintain some CDMA roaming capability for two years as part of this purchase agreement. That may very well explain what happened in the MN Community College area abenusa reported about above. Mark Udhe, this should both explain what's happened as well as indicate that they're working overtime to address this nightmare.

Again, to be redundant, I wish AT&T would do a better job of getting this explanation out there. I know I would have felt better weeks ago had I understood things fully.

**PrairieKat** · 05-28-2011, 12:22 PM

Rapid City SD - update on service - Two accounts: iPhones on one and flip phones on other. We continue to have some problems with text messages not going through or taking more time than it should. Now, again with Saturday and coordinating between family members, cell calls are not going through, bouncing to voice mail. I am fielding calls to our landline and calling out to AT&T users and having some success with calls to cell phones working that way. It is weird.

Color me weary

**bald1** · 05-28-2011, 03:25 PM

PrairieKat,

When you experience text message delays and calls going direct to voice mail, have your phones been in poor or marginal reception areas? That seems to be what I have seen. When I'm at one bar or so, things can be unreliable. When I'm seeing 4 or 5 bars on my phone, everything appears to be good to go. Being somewhat redundant, the femtocell device (3G MicroCell) at home with the 5 bar quality has yet to evidence any of those type of issues. Obviously I need more time with it to validate this but the outlook is quite promising.

**Ben1244** · 05-28-2011, 03:42 PM

PrairieKat and I have similar problems. I can be 4-5 bars and drop them all in a split second when trying to send a message or make a call. I had to go buy a tracfone because I'm on emergency call with the SDNG for the Pierre flooding. I can't trust my iPhone to get the call to deploy.

**Jordan T** · 05-28-2011, 04:13 PM

Ben, that's a sign of just severely overloaded network conditions. Things aren't perfect here, but they ARE getting better...

**bald1** · 05-28-2011, 07:39 PM

Originally Posted by Mark Uhde

Ben, that's a sign of just severely overloaded network conditions. Things aren't perfect here, but they ARE getting better...

It may not be overloads but some other malady ranging from interference to......

**PrairieKat** · 05-28-2011, 09:14 PM

Rapid City and Sturgis - We have been having trouble in downtown Rapid City and in Sturgis with what appears to be full signal strength. It is frustrating because the problem is not readily apparent. We can't be sure that a call is actually ringing into the handset even though to the caller, it sounds like everything is working properly. At this point, I am assuming that my call is not going through and I redial. Yesterday a couple calls did not ring into the handset. Today, most of the calls did not ring into the handset. The phones are showing full strength with between three and five bars. Calls are not ringing into handsets between downtown Rapid City and south to the hospital and east to the airport. I have a few calls bounce directly to voice mail. I send a text and then make a call and on the third or forth attempt, I get through. It was bad enough today that when we made a call and were able to reach the person on the first attempt, we were surprised.

In the last few days, the call quality has deteriorated somewhat and required that we hang up and call again to try and get a better connection. This has happened a few times this past week and in this week was the first time we found ourselves discontinue the call and try the call again in hopes of getting a better connection. Each time we tried for a better connection, it was much better.

I have an AT&T Customer Care Rep doing follow-up on my requests for discounts and new phones. He asked me if he should follow up with me at my cell number. At that point, I realized that my sense of depending on calls going through has degraded enough that I suggested he try my cell number and if he didn't reach me, he should call me on my landline. I explained that this went to the heart of the problems and my general sense of trusting the AT&T service to work ......... that I can't trust the service to perform as it should and demonstrates the severity of the service problems out here.

**whitetigergrowl** · 05-29-2011, 01:16 AM

I live in Sturgis and have been to Deadwood, Belle Fourche, Whitewood, and Spearfish and Rapid City and have had NONE of the issues some of you are having, or even having in Sturgis. And I haven't since around the beginning of April. The only problem area I have seen is the tower near Perkins in Spearfish is sending out great voice signal but the data leaves a lot to be desired. The north side of Spearfish for data is great. The south side, not so much.

Outside of that, all-in-all I would say I'm happy.

**Ben1244** · 05-29-2011, 02:26 AM

That's one of the most confusing and frustrating parts in all of this. I'm not being sarcastic, I am happy that you have great service, I just wish I had the same luck, and PrairieKat does too I'm sure.

The issues are so intermittent, unpredictable, inconsistent, and seemingly indiscriminate yet picky with who they effect, that it is impossible to solve at this point. I went to the store yesterday and for whatever reason, my phone worked PERFECTLY, just like taking a car with a funny noise into a mechanic, if you understand the analogy. Yet the second I left, I tried to call my mother in Hill City, my phone went from full bars to one bar with no AT&T logo and it said "call failed". That happens far too often for me.

**MTRKC** · 05-29-2011, 10:05 AM

To Ben1244 and PrairieKat and others with unexplained, intermittent problems. I FINALLY transitioned last week. I have not noticed any particular issues but did have to go to the AT&T store for a phone swap. I was chatting with the rep about some concerns I had and relayed some stories I had found here about various strange individual problems. He told me that the phone he had initially received for his transition he had given to his wife and he had gone with an iPhone. He said that the original phone (a Captivate) had functioned just fine with him, but his wife had all sorts of problems with it. He decided it must be the sim card and swapped her card with a new one. Problems solved. She now has no problems with the phone and is happy. (Its good when the wife is happy!) He told me that if I had any unexplained problems with my phone to bring it in and he would swap the sim card with a new one he could make right there at the store.
The point of the story is, while I cannot remember exactly what each of you has done to resolve your frustrating and unpredictable problems, if you have not changed the sim card you might want to give it a try. As I understand it they are available from your local AT&T store.
Good Luck.

**whitetigergrowl** · 05-29-2011, 10:22 AM

Originally Posted by Ben1244

That's one of the most confusing and frustrating parts in all of this. I'm not being sarcastic, I am happy that you have great service, I just wish I had the same luck, and PrairieKat does too I'm sure.

The issues are so intermittent, unpredictable, inconsistent, and seemingly indiscriminate yet picky with who they effect, that it is impossible to solve at this point. I went to the store yesterday and for whatever reason, my phone worked PERFECTLY, just like taking a car with a funny noise into a mechanic, if you understand the analogy. Yet the second I left, I tried to call my mother in Hill City, my phone went from full bars to one bar with no AT&T logo and it said "call failed". That happens far too often for me.

This thread and forum have died down so either people are happy or a lot have switched and don't care about this thread anymore.

I switched to AT&T prior to the conversion. People that waited to convert seem to be having more problems than those that switched earlier or signed up new with AT&T before the conversion.

Outside the south side of Spearfish data issues which AT&T says is still being worked on, no matter where I have been things have been great. Zero dropped calls, very fast data speeds (I've gotten up to 3mbps in Sturgis), clear calls, and texts and calls coming and going no problem. I'm aware others for what ever reason are not having the same luck. However if I and others ARE having good overall luck that means even those having bad luck CAN have good luck. I mean, if I live in Sturgis and things are going great for me, but someone visiting to Sturgis isn't having as much good luck, yes something is wrong. But it also means things can and likely will get better for those not having such good luck right now. Obviously if things are going great for one person but not for the next person on the same tower, it likely means it's something other than the tower that may be the issue. Towers don't discriminate.

Also on note yesterday I called AT&T tech support to complain about Spearfishs south side data speeds. I also called a non-AT&T rep to see if they knew more about what may be causing the issues. AT&T said they are still converting the area. Thus why some of the problems. The conversion is not done.

The non-AT&T rep stated what was stated pretty much by bald1. Meaning Verizon communicated jack squat to AT&T about the network and what to expect. And that there are towers not fully running 3G yet. It's more like 3G lite to just get by for the moment. Which they said is explaining some of the problems people are having. Long story short the problems are getting worked on. But they are overwhelmed. The AT&T tech also told me some of the people that were working on towers here got re-positioned to the central mid-west to work on towers damaged or destroyed by the tornadoes so those areas again have service. So it's possible some of the problems may persist awhile longer while they work in the tornado damage zones. They also have told me new towers are being put up and current problems ones being worked on.

But truth be told I'm starting to question AT&T techs competence. They have been nice, but all they have really done is look at the local map, read me some of their notes, then say there isn't anything more they can do.

IMO Things will improve and in some reported cases have. Just keep reporting it, try swapping phones AND sim cards, hard reset your phone from time to time (take battery out, wait, then put back in and power on), double check phone settings, etc..

If things can work fine for me, they can for others too. Something somewhere is the root cause of this all for those experiencing these problems. And in at least half the cases I'm thinking it's not the tower that's the problem.